US soldiers were asked to disarm during a speech by Leon Panetta, the American defence secretary, in a sign of grown concern over spates of seemingly random violence in Afghanistan.

Less than a week after a US staff sergeant allegedly massacred 16 civilians in Kandahar, American soldiers were banned from bringing guns into a talk by Mr Panetta at a base in Helmand province.

Around 200 troops who had gathered in a tent at Camp Leatherneck were told "something had come to light" and asked abruptly to file outside and lay down their automatic rifles and 9mm pistols.

The Western governments' and mainstream media's narrative of a one-sided humanitarian crisis in Syria is rapidly unwinding to reveal a self-serving deception to justify a re-run of Libya-style NATO conquest. In reality, it is the Western powers and their Israeli and Arab henchmen who are fuelling a humanitarian crisis and creating the conditions for all-out war. All of which, it should be said, constitutes criminality comparable to Nazi Germany's wars of aggression.

The latest crack in the Western façade over Syria comes in the form of leaked correspondence from Western private intelligence firm Stratfor, which reports that US-led NATO special forces have been operating inside Syria alongside armed opposition groups. Stratfor is closely aligned with Pentagon planners; indeed can be viewed as a private wing of the Pentagon. The document, disclosed by Wikileaks, cites US military sources discussing a campaign of destabilisation against the Syrian government of Bashir Al Assad, involving training opposition groups and deploying guerilla tactics, including assassinations. In other words, discussing a scenario that approximates to what is actually happening in Syria.

Given Straftor's credentials as a reliable think-tank for the US military-industrial complex, the disclosure can be seen as a damning indictment of NATO criminality and Western mainstream media complicity.

Since political turmoil erupted in Syria a year ago, the monotonous "big lie" narrative from Western governments and the corporate-controlled news media has been one of "brutal state repression against a civilian population" committed by the Assad government.

Question: What's the cost to a company of one disgruntled former employee?

Answer: About $2 billion if it's Goldman Sachs.

That's how much of the bank's market value was wiped out after one of its directors, Greg Smith, resigned from the company and penned an op-ed piece in The New York Times attacking the firm's culture and treatment of clients.

The bank's shares fell 3.3 percent in trading Wednesday as London-based Smith's article set Wall Street and the media ablaze with discussion about the behavior of big banks bailed out by taxpayers after the financial crisis. The share price decline meant Goldman lost some $2 billion in market value.

Still, Smith may not be out of pocket after his scathing condemnation of the bank, which appeared at the tail-end of Wall Street's bonus season.

Annual incentive payouts for top bank employees often reach into the millions, although this year Wall Street bonuses are expected to be down sharply from a year ago, according to Johnson Associates, a New York-based compensation consulting firm.

Year-end incentives declined sharply in 2008 during the economic crisis, but have rebounded over the past two years, Johnson Associates said.

In a rare interview, ex-chief of Mossad Meir Dagan speaks out against a preemptive strike against Iranian nuclear facilities anytime soon. He says the Iranian regime is rational in its own way. Lesley Stahl reports.

Three prominent members of main Syrian opposition group have broken away, accusing the group of serving the interests of foreign countries.

According to a Syrian National Council (SNC) official, Haitham al-Maleh, Kamal al-Labwani and rights activist Catherine al-Telli left the main opposition bloc due to their "disagreements" with the SNC.

Al-Labwani, however, said that they resigned because they did not want to be "accomplices to the massacre of the Syrian people.'' He also accused head of SNC Burhan Ghalioun of running the organization autocratically.

The SNC is "linked to foreign agendas which aim to prolong the battle while waiting ... for the country to be dragged into a civil war," said al-Labwani, adding that "There is no council, it's an illusion."

He also said that many more will quit the council in the coming days.

Kabul, Afghanistan - A tense visit to Afghanistan by Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta got off to an alarming start on Wednesday when a stolen pickup truck sped onto a ramp alongside a runway at a British military airfield and crashed into a ditch as Mr. Panetta's plane was landing.

Mr. Panetta was not hurt, but Pentagon officials said the Afghan driver emerged from the vehicle in flames.

No explosives were found on the driver, a civilian, or in the truck, the officials said, and the Pentagon was not immediately considering the episode an attack on Mr. Panetta. But it reinforced the lack of security in Afghanistan at the beginning of his two-day visit, the first by a senior member of the Obama administration since an American soldier reportedly killed 16 Afghan civilians, mostly children and women, in Kandahar Province. The visit had been planned months ago, but took on new urgency after the Sunday massacre.

Mr. Panetta, like President Obama, has denounced the deaths and vowed to bring the killer to justice, a message he was to deliver in person to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan. The killings have further clouded already strained Afghan-American relations. On Thursday morning, an American official said the suspect had been moved out of Afghanistan to Kuwait. That is likely to further anger Afghans, who called for him to be tried in their country.

Invisible Children disables comments on viral propaganda video + meet the real Joseph Kony.

As the US State Department, USAID centric Invisible Children psy-op KONY 2012 collapses, Invisible Children has disabled comments on their viral YouTube video.

When last checked, negative comments were voted to the top and a cascading effect of skepticism as well as damning facts began drowning out the initial confusion, sympathy, and emotional knee-jerk support the propaganda video purposefully created and preyed upon.

As comments are now being censored - it is suggested that people simply go to the video and click the "dislike" button to voice their opposition to this stunt. Most likely, even that feature will be disabled, and the video KONY 2012 will become the one-way Wall Street infomercial it really is, rather than the faux-participatory "social media" "activism 2.0" experience it masquerades as being.

The Establishment-Funded "Anti-Establishment" Charity

It has been revealed that indeed Invisible Children has been working with USAID, a US government agency that helps lay the groundwork for what could best be described as a modern-day imperial administrative network. It is now also revealed that Invisible Children attended the 2010 US State Department and Fortune 500 sponsored Alliance for Youth Movements (AYM) summit in London.

One of the most top-secret Pentagon departments - the same that spawned America's drones, military robots, electromagnetic guns and other sci-fi weaponry - is about to lose its top officer to Google.

Regina Dugan oversaw the development of some of the US military's most marvelous high tech accomplishments as director of Darpa, but the head of the DoD's research lab is parting ways with the Pentagon to take on a role with Google. Not even three years after she took on the role as the first female director of the America's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, Regina Dugan is now walking away to join the ranks of America's other innovative powerhouse. Dugan will be relinquishing her top roll at the Defense Department's Darpa program and trading in the Potomac River for Silicon Valley, and says it is a natural decision to move somewhere where the possibilities seem endless. Apparently within the cogs of the war machine, there is only so much left to explore.

Confirming the move to a "senior executive position" with Google, Darpa spokesman Eric Mazzacone tells Wired that Dugan couldn't refuse an offer with such an "innovative company" as the search engine giant. Until the latest news broke, however, Darpa had been touted as a creative - yet controversial - research lab for space-age technology only once imaginable. Darpa has developed technologies used across the globe that can take away lives and, as seen with cutting-edge robotic limbs, practically create them.

Four days of Israeli terror bombing left at least 25 Palestinians dead and dozens injured, some seriously. Human rights groups expressed outrage. So did Arab League states, Iran, Turkey, and Malaysia.

Israel's UN envoy Ron Prosor wants the Security Council to condemn Palestinian victims. Like Netanyahu and other Israeli officials, his audacity gives chutzpah new meaning.

On March 12, Egypt's lower parliamentary house unanimously approved a text declaring Israel Egypt's number one enemy. It called for expelling its ambassador, halting gas exports at below market prices, and reevaluating its 1978 peace treaty. It followed the 1978 Camp David Accords.

Its text said:

"Revolutionary Egypt will never be a friend, partner or ally of the Zionist entity, which we consider to be the number one enemy of Egypt and the Arab nation."

"It will deal with that entity as an enemy, and the Egyptian government is hereby called upon to review all its relations and accords with that enemy."

No Israeli comment followed.

For hundreds of years Americans have been committing massacres of women and children, old men and sometimes even young men, mostly unarmed or armed only with primitive weapons. The early massacres were mostly of Indians who refused to leave their lands when Americans decided it was God's will that they steal those lands for nothing or for a few trinkets.

In the Civil War Sherman and Grant routinely massacred Southern civilian populations with bombardments of cities, burning homes and Atlanta [though I do not know death figures], and so on. The introduction of automatic weapons led quickly to far more massive U.S. massacres, obviously in the Philippines where freedom fighters were using primitive weapons to try to gain freedom from the U.S. Empire. The U.S. gunned down tens of thousands of the Philippine sons of liberty and piled them in mass graves.

In WWII the U.S. massacred vast numbers of Japanese soldiers trapped and starving on remote islands, bombed and burned all the cities of Germany and Japan [except Kyoto] and killed and maimed millions in a vast American Holocaust, capping it all off with the ghastly murder and maiming of hundreds of thousands of women and children in seconds by two nuclear weapons dropped to catch them going to school and in ways to maximize the deadly blast effects. The nuclear bombings were done against the pleas of Adm. Nimitz and most U.S. scientists who made the bombs. Nimitz said the Japanese were starving, surrounded and strangled by U.S. ships and would have to surrender soon to avoid starvation mass deaths. But Truman and his War Dept. and Pentagon brass wanted massacres to terrify the world into submission, especially the Soviets who had no such weapons.